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Tag: Chartered Accountants

There Are a Lot of Hungover, Newly Chartered Accountants in Canada Today

We like to cover the international scene as much as we can but it can be tough sometimes when NO ONE EMAILS US. If you’ve got some from north or the border, south of the equator or across an ocean, simply email us at [email protected] and we’ll spice things up around here with some international flair.

I only bring it up because this morning a Canadian reader informed us that today is a big day up north.

I’ve noticed the content on GC is nearly entirely CPA-focused, even though there’s plenty of readers from north of the border! I realise this is likely partially due to the fact that Canadian readers aren’t helping contribute enough. In an effort to help spread the love, I provide the following:

As a bit of background to our system, Canadian Chartered Accountants (CAs) must pass a single national final exam called the Uniform Evaluation (UFE). The UFE is a three-day national exam held once a year in September. The results are then released nearly three months later, usually on the first Friday of December (today!). It’s generally tradition for all the writers (and those that support them) to head out to the bar the night before to help ease the anxiety of checking the results in the morning, which leads to a lot of cheerful new CAs with hangovers today. This tough day of work at my firm (and many others) consists of champagne breakfast with colleagues, lunch with the partners and the office heading back to the bar by 3pm.

Congratulations to all the new CAs!

Scores are officially released at 12 pm so if you’re waiting to enjoy some Mimosas until you get the official word, that’s your choice but either way, you can use this post as a thread for your pre-noon-newly-minted-CA-partying purposes.

Accountants Aren’t Saving Any Personal Finance Savvy for Themselves

This is the risk to providing excellent client service to anyone and everyone; you forget to keep any of that wisdom for yourself.

A support group says it has received a record number of calls from accountants in personal debt over the past few months.

The Chartered Accountants’ Benevolent Association (CABA) for UK chartered accountants says that it has seen a sharp rise in calls from accountants with debt problems over the past few months.

CABA said that it has received its highest ever number of calls from accountants asking for help in dealing with personal debt – and expects the problem to worsen over the next few months.

Kath Haines, chief executive of CABA, said: “The number of calls that we are receiving about debt is probably at a record high and we believe that this will grow quite substantially during early 2011.

Accountants racking up record level of personal debt [Accountancy Age]

No Serious Allegations in India Makes for a Good Year in the Accounting Profession

You know it was a good year when no one got sued, at least according to Asish Bhattacharyya, Professor of Finance and Control at Indian Institute of Management – Calcutta. Here are his thoughts via Business Standard:

Although there was spill over, the year 2010 for the accounting profession was overall a very good year. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) could complete its task of formulating new set of accounting standards, which are fully convergent with IFRS. There was no serious allegation against the Chartered Accountancy profession. Job opportunities for young chartered accountants were plenty. The Institute of Cost and Works Accountants (ICWAI) has also done a commendable job of issuing a significant number of cost accounting standards. It could improve its image in the public eye. We may hope that the year 2011 will be an excellent year for the accounting profession.

That may come off as a bit optimistic but if the power of suggestion won’t work, perhaps a threat will. We hope that the members of the accounting profession will take note of this expectation.

Transparency International places India low in terms of ‘corruption perception index’. The score of 9-10 represents very clean. India’s score for the year 2010 is 3.3. If, India is high in corruption, professionals, particularly the accounting profession, cannot escape the responsibility. The society expects that the accounting profession will make all out efforts to eliminate corruption and that it will not use its skills and knowledge to manage corruption.

Key request being “that the accounting profession will make all out efforts to eliminate corruption and that it will not use its skills and knowledge to manage corruption.” Be careful saying things like that out loud, the big firms might get some revenue source ideas that involve exotic commodotized services packaged as “consulting and advisory”.

I don’t think we can say the same of 2010 being a good year for accounting over here in the good old U S of A (some could argue US accounting has had a bad bad year) but it’s a good thing no one called us and asked us to do exactly that.